Old Fashioned Link Building: Is it still effective?

Link building has been a key to success of many websites. By increasing a website’s links popularity in the form of article marketing, blog commenting, forum posting, web directory submission, press releases and more, a website can appear in SERP results which can drive organic traffic to the site.

At the beginning, we always thought that the more links we built, the higher the chance that our website will rank better in Google which was the main reason why old school link building had been dramatically abused.

When Google rolled out their initial Panda release last 2011 (which mainly targeted article websites, duplicate and thin content), a lot of websites have suffered and lost their rankings in SERPs. They also experienced a big decline in their organic traffic. As a result, the popularity of article marketing for acquiring links easily has been set aside by many SEOs.

The effect of the Panda update on article websites did cause a lot of problems for many websites when it comes to link value coming from article sites. So many SEOs have reduced and even discontinued building links from article websites.

However, when few websites recovered from the penalties due to Panda update, Google rolled out another update that had shaken the world of SEO upside down and made a huge change in the industry.

Just when webmasters had calmed for a while when they got their rankings back, Google rolled out the Penguin update to target websites that violate Google’s webmaster guidelines using tactics such as keyword stuffing, doorway pages, links schemes, buying links – typically the other side of white hat SEO.

A lot of websites lost their rankings again and have even been penalized by Google. This algorithm was also rolled out to target low quality websites, social bookmarking websites and link spamming.

Google is so dedicated to preventing link manipulation, over-optimization and unnatural link building processes (unethical SEO strategies) that they rolled out another algorithm to make this possible.

EMD or exact match domain is mainly targeting the keyword focused website which has the keyword phrase in the domain and keyword focused link building which is the main keyword as anchor text linked to the money site.

What does Google want us to do?

Google realized that link building for the sake of acquiring links only is something that can be abused, be gamed and manipulated. As a result, they are slowly eliminating the common link building methods that we had known through their spam filter algorithms.

These old methods that we used to know are probably considered as low quality links: links that are easily built or gotten. We can’t stop the basic principle of SEO which is link building, but we should not focus on building links only; wse should establish a community within our network and build a brand name that will help us rank better in SEO. But how do we do that?

Establish online connections – Establishing online connection is not a huge problem. There are social media platforms that can be used as a medium to communicate with our target visitors and gain their trust which can help us expand our online connection.

Social platforms such as Facebook, Twitter, Google+ and LinkedIn are really useful and can definitely make a difference on your referral visitors.

We can also establish online connections with people in our niche in a form of content contribution on their blogs as a guest blogger that will throw in relevant topics and new ideas.

Build a strong reputation – Good credibility and strong online presence is the key to gaining your visitor’s trust online. Once you have successfully established a good presence within your niche, you can gain authority from the people in your network which can help you promote your posts to their social media connections and you can also gain through their posts.

Provide content to benefit the readers and not the website – In order to do both, you must learn how to get their attention by providing them useful content and unique information about the topic that can be used as their reference in the future. It is quite difficult to provide what they need, but with an in-depth study on each of your website updates you can ensure and maintain your quality.

Since Google is limiting the common practice of link building, we must step forward and establish a useful strategy to keep increasing website’s link popularity in an ethical way that we and Google will not think of as spam or unnatural link building. At the same time, focus on earning links and building connections in your niche to gain authority to benefit your website.